For the people who are still living under a rock, let me tell you that Redjuice has become one of the uprising Illustrator in the animanga industry. You might have heard of him for the first time in reference to Guilty Crown characters design, but he debuted in the scene as an illustrator for Supercell’s album art. His upcoming work includes illustration of the novel BEATLESS, and the concept designs for recently releasing Vividred Operation. In this Comic Fiesta special presentation, he showed the audience workflow of his illustration and character design process. We weren’t allowed to take photos or do any video recording but TKTakeru ninja’d some shots (but eventually got warned), while I silently recorded the discussion with my friend’s audio recorder. If interested, you can either listen to the recording (which is almost 1 hour), or read through my summary:

Redjuice kicked-off the presentation by showcasing his powerful machine’s hardware and software specs:

He specifically mentioned using SAI and CLIP STUDIO PAINT. Not only because of their Japanese origination but for ease of use. He specifically used latter because it can work on larger illustrations as auto shuts down while processing big files and it takes more than 10 minutes for Photoshop to open any of his completed art.

All his rough sketches for GC character design which also explains the big HDD

He explains about his work for the novel BEATLESS

The sketches for BEATLESS

He then explained about the illustration workflow for backgrounds. He used one of his artwork, GigasDrop as an example. He always begins with a rough sketch like the photo above and then works on the modeling of the background using Cinema 4D. He told us that he’s helped by assistants in modeling because it’s a lot of work for one person. Towards the end, he adds composite materials to add effects to the background and after some final touching up, his art is complete.

He then talked about character designing. For starters, he imagines a fuzzy image of a character as per the brief given. He roughly sketches out the design on a memo pad and then slowly redraws it for a proper sketch digitally. He works on different color variation, standing poses and expressions of the character for his clients to choose from. He also showed us his method of coloring: he takes care of direction and texture of light, especially the reflection. He told us that the composition of the design uses about 60 hours of working time with the project having around 300 layers.

From sketching to the final product

He then slightly touched upon the character design of Guilty Crown (with Shu and Inori design stages). It was a bit hard for him to draw cute/cool character, when his style is more on the gloomy side but we all know that he did a brilliant job with the GC characters. After that, he talked about his work with EGOIST, which was originally a side project. However, the popularity of music made it the project meaty enough for more illustrations and releases.

Lastly, he shared his impression about the relationship between an artists and Internet. He believes that in today’s day and age, the beginning of an illustrator starts with an exposure to Internet. In the beginning, he took part in sketching forums and slowly started sharing artworks of his own. Before 2007, he could only get around a thousand views on his artwork by using Facebook, Twitter and some other local social media vehicles. However, in 2007, after joining deviantArt and Pixiv, his world changed. Views on his works boomed to millions. He began to get jobs thanks to the influence of his standing in Pixiv, landing his first break with supercell. He now uses Ustream and Google+ too, because he finds it fun to draw live and share the drawing process with others. Unlike Ustream, Google+ allows him to broadcast secretly to specific group of people like sharing his work with people he’s working on the same project. “Basically, the Internet is an awesome place,” he said. Definitely, even when his English is not good, he has crossed language barriers to reach out to millions with his art.

And this pretty much wraps up my Redjuice panel coverage. I hope you got more than a glimpse at this brilliant artist who’s definitely going places. Look forward to VIP interview with Redjuice and Danny Choo by TKTakeru along with a complete convention coverage by us soon!

About the Guest Writer: Toori-chan

Anime Otaku, who watches literally everything, genre isn’t a problem as long as the story is good. I’m a Black Rock Shooter fan that goes crazy seeing anything related. An Anime database with no opinion of its own but possesses a serious passion for Anime.

Before Kyokai got me a media pass, I planned not to go because I don’t understand anything about designing stuffs but good thing I attended. It was quite informative if you exclude all those design specifics.

Redjuice himself didn’t expect SHOE to be such a weakling in the Anime, he merely designed the character and have no involvement in the characteristics.

Good post recon, Toori-chan. I’m in awe of Redjuice’s work and the tech in that room. The guy is awesome with character designs. Though Guilty Crown was a train wreck story wise, it was visual eye candy.

I remember seeing Redjuice’s works during my times on DeviantArt and Favorited a good portion of them; though regrettably i haven’t had the thought or appreciation of looking at the name of the artist. It was not until after i took a glimpse at Guilty Crown that i found a nagging similarity, so i looked into it more and there to my confoundedness i had an epiphany that i was once again admiring over redjuice’s artworks again! I’d like to thank him for his hard work and give him applause for his astounding quality, skill, and aachievement.

BTW, is BEATLESS a light novel? from the looks of it, this novel by Satoshi Hase will have a number of illustrations.
and MY GOD… does that Intuos have a BFS (big *pho*king screen)!!!???

I started knowing about Redjuice when I first saw the awesome illustration on my friend’s EGOIST album.

Yes BEATLESS, besides being a figurine by Good Smile Company, it’s originally a light novel. I ‘google’ed about the novel and it had a few comments about the story being too negative. Yes that is the most expensive Intuos in WACOM’s list!!!

I was never really interested in redjuice until I joined this panel, his 3D works are impressive and how he used to be a mechanical engineer reminded me of another artist named Viktor Antonov. Definitely keeping tabs on him from now on.

Man, redjuice… What a lucky guy, being able to draw and be well-known for it enough to have a panel.
Thanks so much for sharing what he talked about. I’ll probably end up trying out Clip Studio just because he uses it.